Utilising community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles, this study aimed to support rural young adults in telling their own story regarding rural sustainability, including their concerns, hopes and understanding of rural sustainability. Through photographs, focus group and presentations, this study engaged intensively and creatively with a group of five individuals living rurally in the Scottish Highlands and Scottish Borders. Developed alongside and during a Beltane event that celebrated the ancient Gaelic May Day, the research contributes to wider studies analysing the concept and practice of sustainability in rural places. As rural Scotland becomes increasingly important in relation to a wider national transition to 'net-zero', there is likewise a greater need to understand the perspectives, concerns and hopes that rural young people have. This paper sought to collaboratively understand rural young people's perspectives on sustainability and to understand the opportunities and issues relevant to the changing nature of Scotland's rural landscape. Our research revealed how the young people involved in this photovoice project perceived the rural areas in which they lived and what sustainability meant in their context.
This article examines the surface thermal performance of parklets as tactical urbanism interventions within London, UK. Using in-situ thermal imaging (FLIR C3-X) during April 2024, the research evaluates surface temperature variations across three parklets measured at three daily periods. Results demonstrate that vegetated parklet surfaces generate substantial localised cooling, with within-parklet temperature ranges of 6-26 degrees C between coolest vegetated and warmest seating surfaces (mean differentials: 2.1-14.0 degrees C depending on material selection), with highly significant effects (p <= 0.003, Cohen's d = 0.94-1.42). This phenomenon - conceptualised as the Parklet Cool Island (PCI) effect - is driven primarily by vegetation-based shading, evapotranspiration, and strategic material selection. Statistical analysis confirmed a clear material thermal hierarchy (vegetation < light masonry < concrete/asphalt < dark metals), with material type explaining 12.6% of temperature variance (F(5,237) = 6.85, p < 0.001). The findings highlight the potential of parklets to function as compact, replicable cool surface nodes within dense urban fabrics, contributing to improved pedestrian thermal comfort and climate-responsive urban design strategies. Study limitations include focus on surface rather than air temperatures, April measurement timing, and absence of control sites and quantitative environmental variable measurements.
This commentary critically examines David Seamon's processual understanding of place in light of contemporary urban transformations in China. While Seamon's framework highlights the dynamic formation of place through interaction, identity, and design, its explanatory scope is challenged by three conditions. First, large-scale redevelopment and state-led planning demonstrate the decisive role of structural forces in shaping urban space. Second, heritage-led and themed developments reveal how place identity is often strategically constructed through design and cultural representation. Third, patterns of mobility and housing instability disrupt the everyday rhythms through which place attachment typically develops. These dynamics suggest that place processes are increasingly difficult to sustain in rapidly transforming environments. However, this does not diminish the value of Seamon's approach. Instead, it underscores its critical importance in resisting the reduction of place to commodified and consumer-oriented space. A renewed humanistic geography must therefore integrate structural analysis while preserving its commitment to lived, processual experience.
This paper conveys the notion of collaborative geographical biography through enmeshed encounters with mental ill-health. In the context of researching the life of Art Extraordinary artist, Adam Christie, this paper argues for the importance of lived expression provided by 'expert-by-experience' researchers arriving in academic spaces, reflecting on the power that it holds for generating deeper understandings of the geographies of mental (ill-)health. The paper seeks to illuminate the possibilities of creative collaboration for revealing the intricate geographies of mental (ill-)health through geo-biographical research. In doing so, it aims to encourage co-created exploration of academic research and writing in geography through lived experience, leading to new ways of considering and configuring collaborative geographical biography.
Vicki Husband (b.1970) is an Occupational Therapist who qualified in 1999 and has spent the majority of her career working in community rehabilitation. Husband is also a poet and her second collection of poetry, Glasgoscopy is centred on her role as a health professional in the North West health sector of Glasgow, where she has worked for over twenty years. In this article, Husband explores geographical themes of space, place, time, distance and scale in relation to Glasgoscopy, as well as reflecting on the creative process of writing the book: development of the book's structure and themes and choice of poetic forms.
Driven by local tenancy conventions, government policy and new transport networks, the growth of orchards played a key role in the development of the Vale of Evesham's horticultural economy from the 1880s onwards. By transforming the landscape from one focused on larger-scale arable and livestock production to a landscape dominated by smaller-scale horticulture in a relatively short space of time, the Vale of Evesham was able to respond to the pressures of the agricultural depression of the later-nineteenth century. In doing so, the Vale of Evesham drew upon already existing skills, work practices and knowledges to create a new spatial organisation, focused on smaller, intensively cultivated, labour intensive holdings. Using a series of GIS-created visualisations this paper demonstrates how orchards developed to form an integral part of the landscape, influencing not just the local economy but also transforming the spatial organisation and work practices of rural society.
This paper explores the recent public discourse on release from prison in England and Wales as a prism through which to view the wider justice system. There is much we can learn by looking at this pivotal point in someone's justice journey as it tells us not only about individual experiences on losing and regaining one's freedom but about fundamental values on liberty and the rule of law as well as a society's stance on justice. This paper confronts the question of how the spaces through which release is negotiated and takes place serve to shape attitudes towards justice. We are interested here to build connections between different geographies of court, carceral spaces and theoretical dimensions of justice. This paper raises important questions about how current public perceptions of failures to enforce the rule of law and erroneously releasing prisoners prematurely are connected to longstanding implications of debates around safety. Here we want to reflect on the endurance of the concept of a fixed border between prison and the outside world by looking at the significance of release.
This article is a first-person account of my encounter with humanistic and phenomenological geography. I review how I first became involved with geography and my graduate experience at Clark University, which in the 1970s was a major center of humanistic and phenomenological work, mostly because of geographer Anne Buttimer, today recognized as a founder of the humanistic tradition. I consider how phenomenology became central to my research and writing, and how my interest in what came to be called 'environment-behavior research' eventually led to my involvement with architecture, planning, and design programs. In the last portion of this article, I overview my recent work investigating place experience and lived emplacement, particularly the theme of how places change processually. I end by suggesting that the current disciplinary emphasis on 'critical theory' and 'critical thinking' might be usefully complemented with 'empathetic thinking' and a revitalized humanistic and phenomenological geography.
A plea is made for taking seriously 'early maps' by map-makers from what are conventionally dated as the earlier and later Middle Ages. Too readily, perhaps, such maps are dismissed either as forgeries dating to later eras or as essentially not 'proper' works of cartography. This article will dispute such dismissal and argue for a continuing scholarly engagement with the maps involved, their origins, makers, influences, and implications. The main aspect of this appraisal will address two early maps of the North Atlantic known as 'the Vinland Maps', both often regarded as fakes, adducing specific evidence suggesting, however tentatively, that they are authentic creations with much still to reveal about the worldly spaces depicted and the times of their creation. A crucial point is that readerships - scholarly and lay - should think further before accepting theories about fake maps and indeed be prepared to take ancient maps seriously as representations of the geographical knowledge held by early seafaring peoples. Additional information will be offered about related debates over the exact location of the place that, upon landfall, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson traditionally named as 'Vinland'.
